Artist’s Biographies

George Jae Hyun Cho

Originally from Seoul, Korea, George Jae-Hyun Cho earned his BFA in Ceramics from NSCAD University and a Diploma in Ceramics from Sheridan College. He was awarded the NSCAD-Lunenburg Community Studio Residency position in 2010 and was accepted into Harbourfront Centre’s Artist-in-Residence. Upon completing the contract with Harbourfront, he will be pursuing an MFA in Ceramics at West Virginia University beginning this September in Jingdezhen, China.

The displacement of familiarity brings forth transformations out of necessity, insecurity, or sentimentality. While universal experiences can take a unique personal manifestation, Cho was marked by adopting a new culture, where he searches for self-identity directed by the medium of ceramics.

Through cultural understanding and adaptation, Cho seeks to find harmony within his personal and artistic struggles to transcend tradition but to also rediscover the spirit of tradition. Challenging the notion of utility and the virtue of classical beauty, the presence and absence of the metaphysical qualities of pottery are explored through deconstruction of ideas and forms. Currently, Cho’s work brings simple utilitarian objects to mimic iconic pottery forms and explore the notion of the ordinary into something unique and virtuous. With this new series of work, Cho continue to investigate the intersection between art and craft, everyday objects and the spectacle.

Ray Caesar

Caesar is known in the fine art world as the grandfather of digital art Caesars works are partly inspired by the Dutch and Flemish masters Vermeer and Jan van Eyck, as well as 18thcentury painter Gainsborough and French Rococo artists Watteau and Boucher. He is also heavily inspired by Japanese culture – this stems partly from the influence of his Japanese wife Jane and her family who introduced Caesar to writers Yukio Mishima and Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Both writers have a distinctive Japanese aesthetic exploring and questioning Japan’s continual slide toward Western-influenced modernization and associated loss of Japanese tradition. Some of Tanizaki’s works present shockingly sexual and destructive erotic obsessions; others subtly portray the dynamics of family life. The femme fatale is a theme repeated in many of Tanizaki’s work. Another theme is the samurai ethic of balancing the cultivation of beauty and discipline by the way of the sword – simultaneously valuing honor, dignity and serenity – life lived as Art. Themes found also in Rays work.

Caesar’s works in turn are creations from his life memories and events. His visual diaries captivate us and repel us, yet we always ache for more. And like a diary, once we put pen to paper the words have soothing effect and gives the artists an inner calm that is shared.

Caesar has paved new roads to the acceptance and transparency of works created completely digitally that take countless hours to create. His work has been exhibited extensively in solo shows internationally in Europe, the States, Canada and Asia as well as appearing in numerous prominent publications that include the Times magazine, Huffington Post, The Globe & Mail, Vogue Italy, Vogue Japan, Hi Fructose, Juxtapoz and others. Caesar works are collected by numerous venerated institutions including the Bristol Museum as well as prominent collectors such as Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy, the Hearst Family (media mogul and owners of O Oprah Winfrey magazine and ESPN cable channel) and others.

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BORN
Born 1958, London England
Current Residence, Toronto CanadaEDUCATION & EXPERIENCE
1977 to 1980 The Ontario College of Art
1980 to 1996 The Hospital for Sick Children, Department of Visual
Education, Medical Artist
1998 to 2001 GVFX Toronto, Senior AnimatorPROFESSIONAL CREDITS
1999 – Primetime Emmy Nomination for Special Effects (Total Recall 2070)
1999 – Gemini Nomination for Special Effects
1999 – Monitor Award for Special Effects in a series

Harold Feist

Harold Feist was born in Texas and studied painting and Art History at the University of Illinois and went on to become a Hoffberger Fellow at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he had hopes of apprenticing under the abstract painter Clyfford Still. However, after a year, a chance trip to Calgary with a friend landed him a teaching position at the Alberta College of Art, and with Still having become increasingly isolated in the latter part of his career, Feist immediately accepted. It was 1968, and by that time the Canadian prairies had already undergone a flourishing in abstract painting. Two decades earlier, Regina, Saskatoon, and Edmonton had become the site of workshops, galleries, and university courses taught by well-known American abstract painters who garnered the praise of New York art critic Clement Greenberg. Unintentionally, Feist came to share a geography with these painters and spent the length of his career in Canada with numerous solo and group exhibitions across North America. He had his first solo exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in 1970 and was included in an important group exhibition at The Edmonton Art Gallery entitled Prairie ’74, which focussed on an emerging set of promising abstract painters in western Canada.

Adam Giroux

Adam Giroux is an emerging artist whose work focuses on the drivers of personal growth and the factors that either prevent or support the pursuit of our goals. His haunting, muted portraits of nameless individuals tell the stories of the subjects’ perspectives toward willpower and the idealized self through cryptic symbolism and personal metaphors. These themes are rendered in large oil paintings, blending both dark realism and abstraction into a work that invites the viewer to evaluate their own fixations through a different lens as he evaluates his own life in parallel.

Gottfried Helnwein

Gottfried Helnwein who’s concerned primarily with psychological and sociological anxiety, historical issues and political topics. As a result of this, his work is often considered provocative and controversial. Reoccurring focuses include the Child unlike portrayed in usual innocent carefree manners are vividly depicted as physically and emotionally harmed. As well as self-portraits and the Holocaust. Also reoccurring are cartoons twisted with a monstrous vision. Other works of Helnwein includes portraits of the Rolling Stone, John F Kennedy for Time magazine, Andy Warhol, Muhammed Ali and works of art in the ‘History’ album of Michael Jackson.

Jared Prince

Jared Prince is a Toronto-based creative.

“I am at my best when I am making. I am not faithful to any one medium in particular and I relish in the transition from two to three dimensional environments. While the visual language that I speak to is incessantly changing, that which ultimately drives me is the therapeutic value contained within each and every creative expression.” -JP

Carol Sutton

Sutton is mainly known for her large scale abstract acrylic paintings, which she paints with her canvas, laid directly on the floor. Related to the tradition of Color Field Painting her art has been linked by prominent critics to the art movement called Lyrical Abstraction. Her smaller paper works often take on unusual structural forms and have widely extended edges, sometimes cut in wave shapes. In 1987 Sutton was one of the few international artists invited to participate in the Art Triangle Workshop in Barcelona, her third Triangle workshop. Two years later a major Canada Council Grant allowed her to again travel to Europe to photograph and study ironwork throughout Spain and France. Carol Sutton’s artwork is represented in many public and private international contemporary art collections including: Smithsonian American Art Museum,The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Mass.

Jeffrey Chong Wang

My artwork is a reflection of my emotions and memories, and shows my understanding and interpretation of my life experience and the world that surrounds me. I have lived in Canada since 1999, but my time spent growing up in my native China has been an important influence on my artwork. I have painted portraits of my family members at different ages as well as different locations in China that I remember from my past.

All the figures that I create on canvas are myself in a way; they reflect my cultural upbringing, personal feelings, and experiences. I think of them as characters in a drama, and the canvas as a stage. My work is a response to the imbalance between my inside feelings and the outside world. I fuse classical concepts and traditional techniques into my work using my own exaggerated figures. These figures reflect the history of western oil painting techniques but also show contemporary themes of eastern culture.View Full CV

Selena Wong

Like the urban environment of her place of birth in Hong Kong, Selena’s work reflects the petite surroundings, the places tucked away, forgotten, and removed from reality. Interested in superstition, folklore and the fantastical, Selena’s meticulously detailed translations of her daydreams and nightmares are both playful and disturbing. She currently works and lives in Toronto with her Netherland dwarf rabbit.View Full CV

Myron Zabol

Toronto based photographer Myron Zabol has had a career in commercial and fine art photography for over 40 years. He has been honored with over 70 awards for his work from the Toronto, Montreal and New York City. Traveling exhibitions from this series of portraits have been permanently archived and administered by Canada’s National Gallery, the “Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography” and curated by the Iroquois “Woodland Cultural Center”, Brantford, Ontario. Myron Zabol’s photography has been featured in both Group and Individual Exhibitions. Selected works are in collections in Europe, Asia, USA and Canada. The center of his creativity is an ability to communicate through personal encounter, visual experience and spiritual conflict. The early selected works reflect society, fashion, landscapes, spiritualism and portraiture.